I'm quite tired of this page speed nonsense

[contract]

I've obessed over page speed in the past and present. Optimized like a mad man... I still do.

But you know what...

Advertisers just aren't getting with the times!

That includes the likes of Adsense, where pagespeed is promoted highly by G.

All of these ad companies are STUFFING their banners with GOBS and GOBS of tracking/data scripts.

I know one network that will add 400 requests PER a single baner ad... Others add 50-100 all day long and no one bats an eye.

Even with the basics... Most are failing to optimize their banner images.

I could go on here..

It's rather amazing to watch a site load in 2 seconds go to > load times of 26 seconds from banner ads. You're telling me I can load my full site in 2 seconds, but your banner ads need 20+ more seconds to load...

It gets to a point where there's not any information out there on how to reduce/optimize that. It's optimize your site and the rest... Well, no one is even talking about it.

Granted, it's NOT an excuse to not focus on page speed. You should be doing everything you can...

Regardless, I find it interesting how publishers do all this work, while the advertiers pretty much nullify it in the end.

 

[Potatoe]

Absolutely agree.

Such a nightmare. It sucks even being in a position to have to make decisions like "Okay, this ad block gets me an RPM of $1.75, and this other one gets me about $1.25 but loads twice as fast..."

I wonder how much they're able to sell all of that extra data for on top of what they pay us for ads. I don't know the intricacies, but I assume that it doesn't take 400 requests to show my visitor an ad and to check if they click it.

 

[eliquid]

This is a gap

Those of you smart enough to know what Im talking about will find a way to make money with this gap.

End the end though, I don't do this for page speed. I do it for money. If I can AFFORD to lose speed and all that comes with slower speed to gain more money, I will do that. Key word being AFFORD here.

 

[Kris]

Agreed! Ran a report on one of my sites that was getting very good speeds but always wanting to improve. One of the culprits that was slowing it down was Adsense. Just laughed when I saw that in the report.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Remember that some of this is asynchronous, doesn't affect render time, and Google doesn't take it into consideration in rankings either.

What is a bitch is that the user might have already bounced before your 3rd waterfall ad has had a chance to fire its pixel.

All you can really do is balance your fill rates and CPM floors and put the best up top, and continually apply to bigger and better networks so you can phase out the weakness. I'd try to have less networks in my waterfall before my fallback with 100% fill rate, and that means accepting a lower floor with a higher fill rate, which often equates into more cash anyways. We should be running calculations on all of this. I'm betting most of us can cut our ad stacks in half while increasing profits.

Beyond that, gotta get into header bidding off-server with DoubleClick for Publishers, etc.

 

[Flex]

You understand why they are using their tags as containers, right?

 

[contract]

This is a gap

Those of you smart enough to know what Im talking about will find a way to make money with this gap.

End the end though, I don't do this for page speed. I do it for money. If I can AFFORD to lose speed and all that comes with slower speed to gain more money, I will do that. Key word being AFFORD here.

Good stuff.

User expirence vs Publisher profit.

I've met a few who have refused to put banner ads on their site because it would affect the user expirence. Ie. "Their site's too new, visitors would get offended, it will hurt the brand, it's too much or too many, etc." So I ask them... Why are you running this website? They respond, "to make money of course..."

I ask, "how are you going to make money then?" Their response: Complete silence...

(Same is true for affilate links, but that's another can of worms, and it comes from absolute laziness to impliment.)